Riffat Hassan, a native of Pakistan, received her doctorate
in Islamic Philosophy at Durham, England. Since 1976 she has been a professor in
Religious Studies at University of Louisville, Kentucky. Currently, she is a
visiting lecturer at the Divinity School Harvard University, where she is
working on a forthcoming book entitled "Equal Before Allah". The following
interview was recorded on April 16, 1986 and formed the basis for a November,
1987, Asian Communiqué radio program produced by Betty Milstead of the Center of
Asian Studies, University of Texas, Austin.

M: Just
in a general sense, what does it mean to be female in a Muslim
society?

H:
That's a difficult question to answer in a simple fashion. Muslim women are
going through the same sort of transition as are women in the world in general.
In most societies there's a redefinition of sex roles going on. But I think the
focus needs to be put on the fact that the overwhelming majority of Muslim women
are illiterate. I come from Pakistan where the rate of literacy of rural women
is something like 3 %. And I think in urban center it's something like 15% which
is really low. This means that these women are cut off from all the developments
that are taking place in the world because they cannot read or
write.

However mass media, television, radio, etc. is making the world
more accessible so that even amongst these illiterate women there are some
changes taking place. All in all, it's a very difficult time for Muslim women
because Muslims on the one hand want things that are modern, such as technology,
science, industry; on the other hand, they're very jealous of their own
traditions and are very conservative in many ways. So that there is tremendous
tension between this desire to be modern and the desire to be traditional. And
women are caught up in the struggle in all kinds of ways because the Muslim home
is really the last citadel for the Muslim man and they are very reluctant to
permit any changes in the home. That's where I believe the main struggle is in
the situation of the Muslim woman, in the home.

M:
Traditionally, what was the role of women in the Muslim
society?

H:
Well, it depends on how far you take the tradition back to, because in the very
first phase of Islamic history, when Islam was established (between 622 and
632), we have clear evidence that both Islam and the prophet of Islam made a
tremendous amount of effort to emancipate women. Soon after that period women
again became victims of the massive weight of all kinds of inherited traditions.
I feel that Islamic tradition has inherited the antifeminist bias that you find
in the Jewish and Christian traditions on the one hand, and the Greek
Hellenistic traditions on the other, as well as the pagan Arab cultural biases
against women, so that they all got compounded.

M: So, the so-called downtrodden traditional women in Islam are really victims of a
pre-Islamic tradition?

H: That's right. I think that Islam tried to liberate them and the Qur’an if
properly interpreted is a very humane document; but the intent of the Qur’an was
subverted by the fact that there were all these inherited traditions and that
Muslims don't event know what is Islamic and what is pre-Islamic. So that when
you want to know what the traditional role of women is, you have to talk about
the period. And the role is affected by a lot of others factors -- political,
sociological, cultural -- plus the role that religion plays at any particular
moment in history.

Everybody talks about the resurgence of Islam, that in this periods of time religious
arguments are coming to the fore. Now they've always been there but they haven't
always been used as powerfully as they are being-used today. In a sense I think
that is good, despite the fact that there is a lot of religious oppression in
the Islamic world and women are being oppressed in the name of God. But I think
that the very fact that religious arguments are being stated publicly is raising
the consciousness of the people with regards to these statements. For instance,
a new law was recently passed in Pakistan called the Law of Evidence and that is
based on a particular verse of the Qur’an and a particular reading of that
verse. It was amazing to see how many people in the country had come to know
about that verse and in how many different ways it could be interpreted. Of
course women are very much affected and threatened by some of these religious
arguments and so women's groups necessarily have to pay attention to them. The
level of awareness is much more heightened now that it has been, I think, in
several hundred years.

M: So you think even though it looks like with Islamization women are going backwards
in a certain sense maybe in the long run it's not a bad
thing.

H:
I think it's a very good thing. In Islam we have a saying that whenever there is
a pharaoh, there is a Moses. So, whenever there is repression there is rebellion
and this rebellion can be creative. Of course the traditionalists would say the
rebellion is destructive because it is aimed at destroying what are seen as
traditional roles and values, but I think every tradition need to be reviewed
from time to time; we have a constantly sift and sort out what is of value and
what is not of value. Islam is rigidly monotheistic and says nothing other than
God is to be deified. So what happens if we deify tradition? It's a very
interesting time and I think Islamization has done a lot of good if just in
terms of raising consciousness.

And I think one fact that a lot of
feminists in the West need to know is that Muslim women often do not even have
consciousness of what are called human rights. I believe that you have to attain
a certain degree of human consciousness before you can understand what human
rights are. And women born in a certain situation are in many ways deprived of
the opportunity to become what we would call fully human. From the moment of
birth to the moment of death they are cast into these roles which are very
rigidly defined; there's no opportunity to grow out of them, or grow beyond them
or to question them... so that they don't know what their rights are let alone
articulate them. You may be in a cage and not know it. And the others who are
out of it of course see that you are in oppression and bondage. Unless you in a
sense are able to get out, you don't know what is to be inside. So that's the
situation and I think that we really need a couple of generations of very
dedicated Muslim women if the rest of the Muslim women are to be made conscious
of their human rights.

M: Do you think education is the secret to this?

H: Education is vitally important, I think, and I'm not talking only about formal
education. Women have to know that there are other possibilities and that God's
word and will can be interpreted in a variety of ways and that that this is not
the monopoly of anybody, particularly because Islam has no
church.

M: Is there what you would term a strong feminist movement in other Muslim
countries?

H: I
know that there have been strong feminist movements in the Arab world. For
instance, we know quite a lot about the feminist movement going on in Egypt, and
we have been hearing about the feminist movement in Iran before and during the
revolution. And in other countries that have gone through the revolution, like
Tunisia, Morocco, I mean the northern African Muslim belt, you hear of Muslim
feminists. All these movements are not identical because the Islamic world
consists of 22 countries and the political and cultural situation in these
countries is different. So you can't make a generalization about it, but I would
say that the woman's question is being forced upon the minds of people. I
remember participating in a conference ten years ago and I made a statement
about the woman's problem in the Islamic world and one of the Muslim scholars, a
man, got up and said to me, 'There is no woman's problem in Islam, what are you
talking about?' So, you know, it was a total denial that there is any
problem.

But now I think that the denial is not as blatant as it was,
because in Pakistan in the last two or three years the feminist movement has
been the strongest movement. Although they were not that many in number, these
women were out in the streets, doing all kinds of very daring things. They had
meetings, rallies, they established support networks, and if it were not for
them the situation of women would have been much worse. They succeeded in
forcing the government to establish a national commission for investigating the
status of women. One of the women's groups, the Women's Action Forum which was
the most vocal group, was successful in many other ways, in being the voice of
the opposition, and I hope that continues.

M: Could
you explain your earlier statement that the poor position of women in Islam has
a theological base?

H: My thesis is that underneath all the more obvious causes -- sociological,
historical, and economical -- for the inferior position of women, is a cause
that has theological roots. The majority of Muslims, whether they are practicing
Muslims or not, believe that God has given men superiority over women. Muslim
men believe that, Muslim women believe that. And three assumptions which I think
have haunted the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions relating to how women
were created have played a fundamental role in determining the attitudes and
ideas relating to women in these societies. These assumptions are the story of
Eve being created from Adam's rib, therefore being derivative and subordinate,
that she got Adam thrown out of the Garden of Eden and that she was created to
be a helpmate to him, which makes him a primary creation and her secondary. We
have to deal with these myths and images in order to create something different.
In order to do that we have to engage in textual analysis of the
Qur’an.

The Qur’an says absolutely nothing about Eve and does not talk
about the creation of woman from man. It talks about human creation in
absolutely egalitarian terms and yet the majority of Muslims believe the Genesis
story. So, I think the theological questions are very important at this point in
time and once we get past them, once we can establish that it was not the intent
of God to create man and woman unequal, then I think the other problems become
more easy to solve. But I think that if we do not deal with the theological
foundations of these negative attitudes we cannot free women from the burden of
guilt and fear, because religion is very powerful and it goes very deep. And so
even women who are at one level free, in the sense of being educated, employed,
self-sufficient, suffer from guilt that is due to these religious beliefs or
assumptions. I think that religion can be a very significant factor in healing
people but it can also be extremely destructive. It depends on how you use it
and I think that so far it has been used against women.

M: I wonder if you could give some examples.

H: One
is that the word 'Adam' which most people think means 'man' or the first man in
fact does not. It is a Hebrew word co-opted into Arabic and is a collective noun
meaning humanity. Specifically, it means 'of the hearth' coming from the word
adama. So the word Adam means human species. If we analyze the various Qur’anic
passages in which it occurs that changes the complexion of the whole
reading.

Another very important term in the Qur’an which occurs in
chapter 4 (called the woman chapter) in verse 34 is the word qawwamun. This is a
plural form of a word which is generally translated as lord, master, ruler,
governor, manager. Once you make the man the ruler obviously you make the woman
the ruled. You've established a hierarchical relationship. In fact this word
doesn't mean ruler at all. There are many authorities on the basis of which I
can say that it means 'breadwinner' and it is an economic term. if we translate
that word as breadwinner the interpretation of the entire verse changes. It's
talking about division of functions that, while women have the primary
responsibility of being child bearers, during that time when they are undergoing
the process of childbearing they should not have the obligation of being
breadwinners, and therefore men should be breadwinners during this period. This
verse is addressed to the Islamic community in general, not to the husbands. But
the verse has been so misinterpreted and so misread that it has given men
virtual control over women's lives.

If you start an argument with a Muslim man and start talking about equality all they do
is to quote the first four words of that verse which says that men are qawwamun
over women, that's the end of the argument. And so, I think, perhaps, the fate
of women rests in this tradition, on how you translate one word. That really
scares you and it also illustrates how very important it is that you deal with
words. I was at a conference last year when this Law of Evidence was passed and
the women were very agitated and a big seminar was held at which the speakers,
mostly men, spoke in support of the women's cause. One of the speakers, a noted
journalist, whose talk was after mine, said, "I don't see the need for this word
by word translation of the Qur’an; what do we gain by it? We should just sort of
talk about the spirit of the Qur’an and say, well, that's fair and that's
egalitarian." But, you know, you can't establish the spirit of the Qur’an if you
don't deal with the letter of the Qur’an. You really can't separate the letter
and the spirit.

I think a textual analysis of the Qur’an is necessary at this point because the spirit
has to be reconstructed by means of the words. Of course, we can be overly
literal in our understanding of the words, but on the other hand, if we
mistranslate words, we can really do a lot of damage to the spirit by rendering
the complex concepts in too simplistic a fashion. Most of the translators have
been men, of course, and even women translators suffer from an anti-feminist
bias and just continue the tradition.

M: Do you feel that if the Qur’an is correctly interpreted and that knowledge is made
widespread, improvement in the status of women would automatically
follow?

H: I think it would have a strong impact because the Qur’an is regarded as the prime
resource of Islam and so if you can show by means of scholarship that something
is indeed in the Qur’an it becomes very difficult for believing Muslims to
ignore it. Secondly, the women's movement in Islam needs a direction. It can
become totally secular. I personally feel that that would be tragic because I
think that you really cannot have a concept of human rights that is not grounded
in some sort of a transcendental vision, however you define it. It's got to be
something higher than the mundane reality that we call this world and only then
can it become an ideal. Now for me that is belief in God and belief that God is
just. I would like for the feminist movement in Islam to be religiously rooted
we have to present the positive content of the Qur’an which has been lost
because of centuries of male chauvinist interpretation of
it.

M: How important is the feminist theology movement in Islam and does it transcend
Islam?

H: Well, the movement is hardly born, let's say it's about to be born. Feminist theology
altogether is a rather new discipline and one that I think is going to be of
enormous significance in the next few decades.

M: How do women react to your work?

H: I think that the majority of the women are very happy to hear what I have to say.
A lot of eyes light up with hope and it's like perhaps for the first time in
their life they think that there is a possibility of
liberation.

M: And that liberation wouldn't be wrong?

H: Right. On the other hand, of course, I do encounter quite frequently hostile
reactions and these come from two types of groups of women. One type considers
itself very conservative and regards my work to be absolutely out of line and
unnecessary and dangerous and destructive. The other women are women who are
afraid of the consequences of accepting what I am saying. At some level they are
excided by it but at another level they are terrified by it because if you
really start believing that you are equal to men, well, how's that going to
affect your lifestyle? Are you then going to continue to be a slave, are you
going to assert your rights? I think that's a real challenge because knowledge
also brings with it some responsibilities. If you really begin to know then you
have to make some changes and it's at the level of changes that the real
difficulty arises. The price for changing your lifestyle is very high in Muslim
society. And there are not very many Muslim women who are willing to pay the
price.

A woman who does not wish to conform to the traditional pattern of
life is perceived as a deviant and has to be ostracised. Islam doesn't have a
church so that we don't have excommunication, but it means being made into an
outsider. This could mean your parents don't acknowledge you or if you are
married, your marriage breaks up. It's not necessary that the marriage break up
but there are so few liberated men in Muslim societies who are not threatened by
a woman who's not liberated. In Islamic society there is really no concept of a
woman alone. Even talk about human rights is always in terms of the marriage,
the rights of the wife, of the mother. What about all these other women? This is
a problem that feminists will have to deal with. It's not necessary that the
marriage break up but there are so few liberated men in Muslim societies who are
not threatened by a woman who's liberated.

I had never seen this before, but I saw that in Pakistan in the last two years there
are these groups of women who are willing to say okay, if it means that we can't
be married, fine, we accept that, if it means that we have to fend for
ourselves, fine, we'll accept that. This spirit was not present before and I
think when women are ready to pay the price for being free so that the next
generation of women will be free, then there is real hope, because it's not a
matter of rhetoric. If we believe in it then we have to live it. Change is going
to take time and a lot of effort. And it is not going to happen until women
change their roles and then men will be forced to. This just seems to be a law
of nature that anybody who is in a dominant position, in a position of power, is
not willing to give that up unless they are forced to or unless they have a
change of insight.